I have a love-hate relationship with
Erica Jong.
Sometimes I just have to read her, and
literally NEED the thrilling deep erotic tone of her words coursing through me.
Other times, though, I am just beyond
irritated by (and slightly suspicious of) her heroine’s obsessive, whorish,
shallow nature and want nothing less than to read her books, let alone see them.
I recently moved and threw out all
her books in a fit of the latter feeling.
And, as Murphy’s Law would have it,
just 3 months later and I am back in “I Love EJ” mode.
Perhaps its because we never forget
our First.
First drink, first joint, first Acid
experience, first kiss, first time, first love. First everything.
And Erica Jong was my first taste of
erotic literature. I read her books
way before I had so much as my first kiss.
Hmmm, maybe that’s why I have almost
always been slightly disappointed with the real thing: because from the start,
my head was filled with images and fantasies of Leila Sand and Dart or Isadora
Wing and her Zipless Fuck.
One image I shall never ever get out
of my head is when her lover comes to her but she has just gotten her period,
heavily. He is not deterred in the slightest and, despite her genuine protests,
goes down on her with all the glee of a kid in a candy store, only to come up a
few minutes later sucking on her tampon.
Yes, beyond sick and twisted. But
the image has been lodged in my brain ever since.
Someone up there was listening though
because just yesterday I found one of her books in the bargain bin at my
favourite bookshop.
Later in the garden, I sat back to
revel in the fabulousness that is Erica Jong:
All men worth having in bed are partly beasts.
Every myth we have tells us this: Pan with his animal legs and human mouth; the
beast that Beauty left her father for; the devil himself. With the wild witches
– the bacchantes of Salem – cavorting about his puckered anus. And kissing it.
Part of the lure is the degradation, the fact that we are creatures born
between piss and shit, and in our darkest moments we obsessively recall that
dilemma.”
On her absconding lover’s penis:
“Is it just because I can possess it merely for
brief interludes that it holds me in such thrall? Would I love it less if it
were there all the time?
No danger of that. For I love a runner. No
sooner does he call me his witch, his bacchante, his lady, his love, than he
has to flee.
Oh, I think there is some of this in all men –
however they express it. The longing to return to the womb, to be engulfed, to
be totally passive between the huge breasts of the mother goddess, is so strong
that no sooner do they feel themselves yielding to our primordial power than they
have to run. Hence the battle between the sexes: she wants him safe between her
legs forever; he, being afraid he wants to stay there, flees.
Where he flees is immaterial. War. The office.
Golf. The salt mines. Tennis. Outer space. Deep-sea diving. Basketball. Las
Vegas. Another woman. It’s all the same flight …
I love him in part because I cannot tame the
wild creature that dwells inside him …
Since he cannot be good, it would be easier if
he were entirely bad so at least I could hate him. But how can I hate him when
the very badness in him makes him so very good where it counts – in bed?
She is terribly good … terrible clothes
and hairstyle notwithstanding.
Is sex dirty? It is if you’re doing it right.
everything different is a first, inside and out.
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